The Week USA - Vol. 19, Issue 935, August 02, 2019

For more than four decades, Robert

Morgenthau was the face of justice in

New York City. Serving first as chief

federal prosecutor for the Southern

District of New York in the 1960s and then notching

35 years as Manhattan’s district attorney, Morgenthau

oversaw a total of 3.5 million prosecutions, and was

known as “the boss” to his subordinates and to tabloid

headline writers as “Morgy.” And Morgenthau—the

model for stern prosecutor Adam Schiff on TV’s Law

and Order—earned plenty of headlines. He prosecuted

low-level crooks as well high-profile perps such as mobster John

Gotti, mother-son grifters and killers Sante and Kenny Kimes, and

Mark David Chapman, John Lennon’s assassin. Believing that crime

had to be battled in the streets and “in the suites,” Morgenthau

became the bane of white-collar swindlers. Morgenthau’s investiga-

tion of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) in

1991 exposed a multinational criminal network that laundered cash

for terrorists, dictators, and drug cartels, and led to hundreds of

millions of dollars in fines and forfeitures. Asked why a Manhattan

lawman was taking on a Luxembourg-based bank, he quipped,

“The long arm of the law.”

Born in New York City, “Morgenthau was heir to a family that

enjoyed influence in finance and Democratic politics,” said The

Washington Post. His grandfather had been President Woodrow

Wilson’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, his father President

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Treasury secretary. Morgenthau served in

the Navy during World War II and in 1944 found him-

self bobbing in the Mediterranean after his destroyer

was sunk by a Nazi torpedo. If he lived, he promised

God, he’d devote his life to public service. “I was not

in a very good bargaining position,” he said. Back

in the U.S., Morgenthau spent 12 years in corporate

law before making good on his pact in 1961, accept-

ing his childhood friend President John F. Kennedy’s

appointment to U.S. attorney for Manhattan. He held

the post for eight years, a term interrupted only by

Morgenthau’s failed 1962 run for governor, said The

New York Times. As federal prosecutor, he indicted 150 organized

crime figures and created the office’s first special unit to investigate

Wall Street, going after “stock manipulators, money launderers, tax

lawyers, and IRS accountants.”

Morgenthau resigned after President Richard Nixon took office in

1969, said the New York Post, and was elected Manhattan’s DA

five years later. “He’d win re-election as DA another seven times,

working with 16 police commissioners through the administrations

of five mayors.” Morgenthau prosecuted a steady succession of mis-

behaving Hollywood bigwigs, rappers, and 1 percenters; his case-

load included Boy George, Quentin Tarantino, and Tupac Shakur.

But on his last day in office—Dec. 31, 2009—Morgenthau asked

to be remembered for his role in making the city safer for ordinary

New Yorkers. “In 1975, when I became district attorney, there were

648 murders in Manhattan,” he said. “Last year, there were 62,

and this year, so far, there are 58.”

Robert

Morgenthau

1919–2019

John Paul Stevens denied undergoing a

liberal conversion during his 35 years

on the Supreme Court, the third- longest

tenure in U.S. history. It was the other

justices who changed, he insisted, as staunchly conser-

vative Reagan and Bush appointees pushed the court

to the right. Still, the emergence of Stevens—a Repub-

li can lawyer appointed by Pres i dent Gerald Ford in

1975—as the court’s leading liberal voice surprised

him as much as anyone. Before retiring in 2010 at age

90, he authored some 400 majority opinions, including

landmark rulings that enforced the separation of church and state

and curtailed executive overreach. He was also among the court’s

most frequent dissenters, vehemently opposing decisions that broad-

ened gun rights, abolished limits on corporate campaign spending,

and effectively awarded the presidency in Bush v. Gore. That par-

tisan 5-4 decision on Florida’s vote recount in 2000, he wrote in a

scathing dissent, would critically damage “the nation’s confidence in

the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”

Stevens was born in Chicago, where his grandfather, James, opened

the world’s biggest hotel in 1927, said The New York Times. The

Depression forced the sale of the 3,000-room Stevens Hotel—now

the Hilton Chicago—and Stevens’ father was put on trial for loot-

ing the family insurance business “in a failed effort to keep the hotel

afloat.” He was found guilty of embezzlement in 1933; the convic-

tion was overturned the next year. The experience taught the young

Stevens an enduring lesson about the very real harms of “overzeal-

ous prosecution,” said The Washington Post. He graduated from

the University of Chicago in 1941 and joined the Navy as an intel-

ligence officer that December—one day before the attack on Pearl

Harbor. Stevens spent most of the war cracking Japanese codes in

Hawaii, then attended Northwestern Law School, gradu-

ating with the highest grades in school history.

He practiced antitrust law in his hometown, said The

Wall Street Journal, and in 1970 was named to the 7th

U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals by President Richard

Nixon. When President Ford sought an uncontroversial

judge to fill a Supreme Court vacancy in 1975, Stevens’

“largely apolitical reputation played well in the aftermath

of Watergate.” Confirmed by the Senate 98-0, Stevens

was initially reliably conservative, joining a 5-4 majority

to reinstate the death penalty in 1976. Yet in 1989 he cast his first of

several votes upholding the constitutional right to abortion in Roe v.

Wade, and in 1994 became the court’s senior associate justice, allow-

ing him to assign opinion-writing duties whenever he opposed the

chief justice. He also spoke for the majority in several decisions that

checked executive power, including the 2006 opinion that blocked

the Bush administration from holding military trials for detainees at

Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, without congressional approval.

“Stevens’ trademark bow tie and gentle mien belied a competitive

edge,” said USA Today. He tore into District of Columbia v. Heller

in 2008, which for the first time interpreted the Second Amendment

as protecting an individual’s right to gun ownership, and wrote a

90-page dissent to 2010’s Citizens United v. FEC, which freed cor-

porations from federal limits on campaign spending. After retiring

that year, Stevens said his one regret was voting to uphold capital

punishment, though he had joined majorities that ended executions

for offenders younger than 18 and for those with mental disabilities.

“Learning on the job is essential to the process of judging,” he said

in 2005, calling the evolution of his views “one of the most impor-

tant and rewarding aspects of my own experience.”

The Supreme Court justice who became a liberal icon

The DA who cleaned up New York City

John Paul

Stevens

1920–2019

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